Elon Musk's AI initiative opened an online dojo

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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the artificial intelligence you coded in your garage probably doesn't have the type of resources behind it that Google used to make DeepMind a fearsome Go competitor. That's what the Elon-Musk-backed OpenAI Gym is for. It's in open beta right now, and available test environments include Go on 9x9 and 19x19 boards, a ton of classic Atari games and robot control simulations, among others, with more to come.

The firm says it launched this is because progress made in reinforcement learning lags for a few reasons. Firstly, OpenAI notes that existing, open-source testing environments lack diversity and are difficult to set up and use. What's more, there's a dearth of standardization, which makes reproducing the tests -- key for any sort of academic research -- between different projects in an apples to apples way pretty hard to do.

Want in? The Python-based environments apparently are compatible with algorithms written in "any framework," including Tensorflow and Theano. But if you're looking to dominate the leaderboards you might be disappointed: OpenAI says it's worried less about your high scores and would rather see the generality of your technique when you upload your results.

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